[SATA] Wierd XP Install problem.

I have been using my MSI K8T Neo Mainboard for about a year with an P-IDE HDD. I recently just purchased a WD S-ATA Raptor - 36 GB and was beggining to install a fresh copy of WindowsXP SP2.

I swapped out the P-IDE for the S-ATA and verified connections through the bios. I also made sure to verify in the bios that the motherboard detected the SATA HDD. After that I set to boot from CD and booted into the WindowsXP setup making sure to hit F6. I popped in the floppy and everything seemed dandy. I saw my drive as a raw disk and formatted it successfully using NTFS.

This is where the problems came. After the disk was finished formatting I recieved an error that says "Cannot copy viamraid.sys. I retry and pop the disk in and out with no luck.

This is ultimately my end problem. Here is a list of troubleshooting efforts that I have already attempted with no success..

- Swapped the Floppy drive out with another. Niether drives have ever shown signs of trouble.

- Reformatted numerous floppy disks countless times using different types and trying many different drivers.

- Burned the files to a CD and fed the disc in at the error screen. [Yes, they were in the same/proper format as the floppy drives.]

-Skipping the install of the viamraid.sys file and the two others after it. [XP files are copied but when it attempts to restart/install I recieve the blue screen of death.]

-Loaded the defaults for the bios and reconfigured/tweaked them many different ways.

-Grabbed the latest drivers from the MSI site labeled:

VIA PIDE/SATA RAID Drivers & Utility

Are there any ideas short slipstream XP install discs with pre-loaded SATA drivers or is that the only way? I have performed this operation [SATA WinXP install] numerous times and this is the only time I have had issues like this.

It just baffles me because the WindowsXP setup clearly sees and utilizes the drivers to detect the SATA drive as well as its size [without hitting F6, the XP setup tells me it can't find any hard disks]. It just seems as though after it's done formatting, the XP setup chooses to not recognize the initial storage location of the pre-loaded SATA drivers.

To be honest, I am unsure where, when you hit F6 and load SCSI/RAID drivers, the XP setup stores those files from the floppy. Memory?

Thanks in advance for efforts TEEDUB.

Stupid question but is viamraid.sys even on the floppy? It might be in the wrong directory. And where did you get the floppy files from? Check the manufacture of the drive and try redownloading.

Me being the blissfully ignorant one didn't even realize that XP didn't support SATA out of the box. This is good to know for the future.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLG,GGLG:2005-48,GGLG:en&q=Cannot+copy+viamraid%2E sys


yes?

Stupid question but is viamraid.sys even on the floppy? It might be in the wrong directory. And where did you get the floppy files from? Check the manufacture of the drive and try redownloading.

Me being the blissfully ignorant one didn't even realize that XP didn't support SATA out of the box. This is good to know for the future.

Yes sir. It is indeed on the floppy and in the correct location [path] for XP to install. I have even set the disc up in different forms such as:

\
|--TXTSETUP.OEM
|--viamraid.cat
|--viamraid.inf
|--viamraid.sys
|--RAID
........|--WinXP
..............|--viamraid.cat
..............|--viamraid.inf
..............|--viamraid.sys


Still no luck.

I got the copied files off of the original floppy that came with my mobo as well as downloaded the latest version off of MSI website.


http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...viamraid %2Esys

yes?


Yes, I checked the solutions that google has listed and thus far none have solved my issue.

Would a slipstream XP disc work for this problem? Would it be able to grab the drivers off of the XP disc early enough to "copy" windows xp files for setup?

I never needed the driver disk that came with my K8N neo. I made sure that the raptor was my primary drive in the bios and did a straight install from the windows xp sp2 cd.